Vengeful: A Conspiracy Crime Thriller (The Gabriel Series Book 3)

by David Hickson

  The warehouse was a vast echoing space, large enough to play a game of football in, if it hadn’t been for the hulking shells of old ships abandoned by the previous tenants. When I had first taken occupation the place had been littered with old paint cans and rusty tools that had spilt from their toolboxes and lay scattered about the floor as if the shipbuilders had departed in a hurry. But Robyn and I had cleared away the junk and imposed a little order on the space. A collection of broken deck chairs huddled beside the rusted hull of the Anna-Marie, which had been a fishing trawler in her youth, and now served as a lounge or a briefing centre, as occasion demanded. Sleeping quarters were in the small rooms at the back. The centre of the warehouse was occupied by a working kitchen that Captain Steven Chandler had some Italian fitters install. Chandler had been my captain when I served with the special forces, and he too had been discharged. He had recently included me in a small squad of misfits he had put together, and it was his idea that I should move into the warehouse because of the heightened risk that my identity had been compromised.

  The kitchen comprised a wooden island with gas plates, an eye-level oven and a range of free-standing drawers which opened on luxuriously smooth runners. It gave the impression of a film set, particularly when all the lights were on, as they were tonight. The bulky ships receded into shadows where one expected to find crew members sneaking a cigarette between takes.

  And playing the lead role tonight was Captain Steven Chandler himself, standing in the brightly lit kitchen with a wooden spoon in one hand and a striped apron over his regulation black uniform. He had just opened the oven door when I arrived and the steam cleared to reveal him. The highest rank Chandler had achieved in the British Special Forces was captain, but we called him ‘Colonel’ because of the respect that we had for our leader. He was over six foot of finely toned physique, clothed in paramilitary garb that fit him like the skin of a panther. His face was lean, sharp cheekbones and lines etched into it from many years of active service. His white hair was cropped short like a skullcap, his eyes were grey and seemed cold at first glance, but when you looked into them as I had done in some of the most terrifying moments of my life, you saw the warmth of the man inside.

  “Where is Robyn?” he asked.

  “She moved out,” I said. “A few days ago.”

  “Why?”

  Chandler closed the oven door and turned to face me, his eyes probing me as if everything depended on my answer to that question. I could have replied that it was none of his business, but of course her irrational behaviour was his business: Robyn was a founding member of the team; she had worked with Chandler before I joined them, when I had been working for the Department and living with Sandy.

  “You know how vulnerable she is,” said Chandler, not waiting for my reply. “She needs to be watched. How could you let her walk out?”

  “How could I stop her? I’m not her keeper.”

  “She’s drinking – we cannot afford that now.”

  “She hasn’t spoken to you?”

  “She hasn’t.”

  Chandler’s face was tight with irritation. The oven behind him started beeping and he swung back to it as if he was about to punish it for interrupting. But he grabbed some oven mitts, opened the door, and removed a steaming dish.

  It was worrying that Robyn hadn’t called Chandler. He had become like a father to her when he had supported her through her grief after the death of her fiancé, Brian, who had been a good friend of mine and a comrade of ours. In turn, Robyn had helped Chandler to build a new life outside the British army after his discharge. It was a life that applied his military skills and training in a very different way.

  “You seen the news?” asked Chandler, dropping the subject of Robyn for the moment. “Our friend BB made an announcement.”

  “About what?”

  “Best you see for yourself. You got a device to connect with the outside world?”

  He looked around the warehouse as if finding it hard to believe that someone could live in such a way. I refrained from pointing out that it had been his idea that I take refuge here, and fetched a laptop from the sleeping quarters.

  It didn’t take long to find the announcement. Riaan ‘BB’ Breytenbach was standing on a raised platform in one of the plush meeting rooms of the Gold Mining Conglomerate of South Africa. The podium was raised because BB was not as tall as he liked the world to think he was. The room was filled with assorted media hounds who had been treated to a lavish breakfast by the looks of it, and were checking to make sure all the bottles of champagne were really empty as Breytenbach held his hand in the air and waited for silence.

  His was a face familiar to most South Africans, not only because he was one of the country’s wealthiest bachelors, but also because of his extraordinarily brave survival of the daring heist that had been performed on his private game farm. The bravery of that survival was purely the spin that the Gold Mining Conglomerate’s media relations department had put on it – they had painted the picture of an innocent hero with nothing but an old Winchester shotgun to defend himself against a cruel gang of heist criminals.

  The truth of the matter had been a little different, but that hadn’t stopped Breytenbach from rising to the status of hero – and he made a fitting hero. He had film star good looks and an even tan from the golf course, which had paled only a little during his time in hospital. He also had an artificial leg which served as the perfect reminder to his fellow citizens of his battle against the criminal forces that were threatening to overwhelm the country, having been deprived of the real one by the devilish criminals who had stolen gold bars from him. His impassioned speeches about his efforts to bring the ‘Gold Heist Gang’ to justice and have them pay for their crime had become popular media events.

  “Skip past this bit,” said Chandler, looking over my shoulder. “I’m sure you’ve seen it all before. He’s got some funny pictures coming up. Skip to them.”

  I skipped ahead, and some faces popped up in rapid succession. I went back and played them at normal speed. They were an artist’s impression of four people. A man with brown hair, an unremarkable face and heavy-framed spectacles; a woman with a thin face, black eyes and short tousled hair; an older man with a skullcap of white hair; and a black man with big drooping jowls and small eyes.

  “New pictures,” said Chandler. “And he’s offering a reward. A million US each.”

  “They’re better than those blurred photographs,” I said. “But still not very good.”

  “Of course not. BB was so busy trying to shoot off that old Winchester, you think he bothered looking at anybody?”

  “A million US? Dead? Or alive?”

  “Alive,” said Chandler. “He wants them alive, doesn’t he? Wants to know where they’ve hidden his gold.”

  “It must be a relief for them,” I said. “Life insurance of a million dollars.”

  “A relief indeed,” agreed Chandler, and he smiled for the first time. “The food’s ready. Let’s eat.”

  Chandler had cooked an Italian pasta dish. The recipe, he told me, came from a man he had fought with in the Pathfinders in Kuwait. Chandler had always taken an interest in cooking, and enjoyed producing quality food in difficult conditions, such as over a campfire on an active mission. Since his discharge, the interest had developed into a passion that sometimes verged on obsession.

  I told him about the call I had received from Khanyi, and he shook his head with derision. He had little respect for the Department.

  “Let them play their game, but tread carefully,” he advised.

  “What is their game? They can get hold of me whenever they like. Why bother with the cat-and-mouse nonsense?”

  Chandler took another mouthful and chewed thoughtfully.

  “Perhaps it’s not you they want,” he said eventually. “They’ve already got you. It’s your new friends they’re interested in.”

  “You think so? For what?”

  “What do we do best?”
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  “You and me? Or all four of us?”

  “That’s a good question.” Chandler turned his head to the side as if he was listening for something. “It’s stopped raining?”

  “Stopped when I arrived. If it was still raining, we wouldn’t be able to hear ourselves over the racket it makes on the steel roof.”

  “Let’s take a walk,” he suggested.

  The rain had stopped, but the broken surface of the quay was so flooded that we had to pick our way using the higher ridges of tar as stepping stones. Eventually we gave up and splashed through the potholes. We took our regular walk back towards the start of our quay, which was one of the original structures built in the late 1800s. It provided the harbour with protection against the cold Benguela current carrying water up from the South Pole.

  We turned and walked down the quay adjacent to ours. This one was still operational, and served medium-sized cargo ships, brought into the docks by pilots who would manoeuvre the enormous vessels alongside so that they could be offloaded by a team of crane operators and officious men in hard hats. But the dock was deserted this evening. There was only one hulking ship, the offloading completed, and a few crew members smoking on deck and watching the city settle into the night.

  A pair of headlights bounced over the rough surface of the quay towards us. A vehicle moving slowly, as if it was looking for something. I pulled Chandler over to the narrow strip between the cranes and the water where we hesitated under cover of one of the hauling machines. The vehicle was an open-topped jeep. Two men wearing black military-style outfits, scanned the area lazily. The passenger held a Vektor R5 automatic casually on his knee.

  “Breytenbach’s goons,” I whispered.

  Breytenbach’s private security outfit were the only ones who carried R5s and wore those all-black uniforms. The two men were doing a useless job of searching the quay, if that was what they were doing. They glanced around but were blinded by the reflection of their own headlights and didn’t even notice us behind the bulky machinery.

  When they had passed and the sound of their jeep had faded into the night, Chandler and I continued a couple of hundred metres down the quay, where we stopped. I lit a cigarette, and we looked up at the crane beside us. There were seven cranes that lined the edge of the quay, huge steel structures that reached ten storeys into the air and could lift forty tonnes each. Their legs rested on widely spaced tracks and could be coupled to the immense, grey machines that pushed them up and down the edge of the quay. The crane beside us had a new set of counterweights hanging in a steel cage, large slabs of concrete stacked one above the other.

  Chandler squinted up at the counterweights.

  “Holding up okay,” he said.

  “Not for much longer. We’re going to have to move them.”

  “And soon,” agreed Chandler. “Breytenbach knows his gold is here somewhere. That’s why his black-suited goons are searching the docks. My ears on the ground tell me he’s figured out it came down with that wildlife and believes it hasn’t been driven out of here. I didn’t realise they’d started the search already.”

  “They’ve been running haphazard searches for a few days.”

  “It will work against him,” said Chandler. “He might as well be using a loudhailer to tell everyone he’s lost his gold here.”

  “But they’ll not find it,” I said, more to reassure myself than because it was fact.

  “Maybe not. But they will find our warehouse, you can be sure of that.”

  “We’ll have to move out then, before they do.”

  “It’s our only option.”

  “And we’ll need to clear the gold out first. How long do you think we have?”

  “A few days, a week at the most.”

  “Will your man be ready?”

  “In five days he’ll be floating offshore. International waters where we won’t be bothered. We can take it out to him.”

  I finished my cigarette and tossed the stub into the sea.

  “Breytenbach is somehow involved in the game the Department are playing,” I said.

  Chandler’s eyes narrowed. He knew Breytenbach as well as I did, if not better, because he’d been our captain when our squad had been sent to one of Breytenbach’s gold mines for our final posting. Supposedly to help Breytenbach and his cohorts defend against terrorists from the Congo who were stealing gold from them. But it turned out that the gold was not being stolen by the terrorists after all. Unfortunately, by the time we discovered that detail we had already killed most of them.

  “That’s interesting,” said Chandler. “You should be careful of those government goons, Angel. I don’t like the sound of them joining forces with Breytenbach.”

  “Will do,” I said, and took a last look up at the blocks of concrete in which we had hidden Breytenbach’s gold bars. Khanyi was right about my knowing that there were more than a few of them. I had counted them – there were one hundred and twenty.

  “I’d better find Robyn,” I said.

  “You had,” said Chandler. “Bring her back, even if she’s too drunk to stand up on her own. We need to do this together.”

  Six

  “You probably think about a box, don’t you?” said Madame Lee, in a voice that sounded like she was crushing rocks in the back of her throat. She hadn’t removed the ivory cigarette holder that drooped from the corner of her mouth like a permanent growth and which bounced up and down as she spoke, leaving a trail of smoke like an aeroplane writing messages in the sky. She pursed her lips now and sucked on the cigarette, then opened her mouth again like a huge frog, wisps of smoke emerging from between her teeth. The impression of a frog was enhanced by the thick spectacles which caused the wide Asian eyes to bulge.

  I admitted I had thought of a box.

  “Mistranslation,” said Madame Lee. “It was a jar, not a box. A stone jar, and it contained all the evils of the world. Well, what did you men expect? She was the first woman, wasn’t she?”

  “Was she?”

  “Pandora,” said Madame Lee, after sucking some more smoke in to fuel the gravel machine, “means ‘all gifts’ in Greek. She was the first woman, commissioned by Zeus to punish Prometheus for providing men with the gift of fire. That’s what women are – a punishment wrought upon men.”

  Madame Lee sucked on her cigarette and did the frog face again.

  “But a divine punishment,” I said, “which makes it easier to bear.”

  Madame Lee’s mouth opened and a cloud of smoke came out to the sound of an animal bark.

  “And didn’t Hope remain behind in Pandora’s jar after she had unleashed the evils upon the world?”

  “You’re a classical scholar,” said Madame Lee, showing no surprise.

  “I read about it on the back of a breakfast cereal box. It’s why we keep wanting to open Pandora’s box – to find that hope.”

  “Which is why you’re here,” said Madame Lee, returning to business with a bump. “You want to open the box.”

  “I do.”

  “What’s your taste?” asked Madame Lee.

  “A friend of mine spoke of a girl he liked here. A couple of months back it would have been.”

  “Did he,” said Madame Lee, forgetting to add the question mark. “You’ll have to provide more detail than that. We have many girls, and cater for a wide range of tastes.”

  “A young girl,” I said, “coloured, with light, almost golden eyes.”

  Madame Lee sucked on the cigarette, then allowed the smoke to drift through her teeth.

  “I don’t have a girl with golden eyes,” she said without regret, “but we have other coloured girls. You like them coloured?”

  “I do.”

  “Mulatto then,” she said and held up a hand with knobbly knuckle joints and used a finger from the other hand to bend back an index finger which bore a large ruby. “Girl,” she said, bending a second finger back. “You like a bit of pain?”

  “I prefer the pleasure.”

 
; “Like to give pain?”

  “Not particularly. My friend said the girl with the golden eyes had a friend here. Arrived at the same time as her. Perhaps if the golden-eyed girl is no longer here, her friend might be?”

  Madame Lee toyed with the third finger, and her eyes narrowed to see me better through the smoke.

  “We don’t like history,” she said. “At Pandora you start afresh, you find yourself a new girl, or boy, or whatever you want, we don’t like emotional baggage or over-specific requests.”

  “No history,” I said. “Just that she sounded like my kind of girl.”

  Madame Lee took an extended draught of the cigarette, and her face swelled a little as if she might burst, but then smoke found its way out through her teeth and the crisis passed.

  “We do a line-up,” she explained, “and we pay in advance. No discounts, no refunds.”

  “I understand,” I said, and the third finger was released in order to press a button on her mahogany desk. It was a heavy finger, weighed down by a diamond large enough to have been stolen from a museum, and it rested on the button for a few seconds.

  Madame Lee and I sat in silence for a minute, then the door behind me opened soundlessly, allowing a small draft of air in to snatch at the haze of smoke around us and swirl it about.

  “Take Mister Moss to the front room,” Madame Lee said to the bodybuilder dressed in black silk who appeared beside me. His skin was so dark that it was only possible to tell he was looking at me when his teeth glimmered through the haze as he gave me a discreet smile to show that he made no judgement on men who needed to be taken to the front room.

  The front room of Pandora was fitted out like the drawing room of an English country manor, complete with a small bar containing a smiling, bald barman who provided me with a whisky while I waited for my line-up. He placed my credit card on a silver tray in case it would be needed to pay in advance for further services without the possibility of a refund, and encouraged me to enjoy the view of the gardens through the wide bay window so that I didn’t feel I was required to explain myself to him.